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• Auction House:
  Bonhams Australia
• Sale Name:
  The Fred and Elinor Wrobel Collection | A Curated Salon
• Sale Date:
  23 Apr 2023 ~ 2pm (AEST)
• Lot #:
  28
• Lot Description:
  Weaver Hawkins
  (1893-1977)
  Self Portrait, 1941
  oil on composition board
  59.0 x 44.0cm (23 1/4 x 17 5/16in).
  signed lower right: 'Raokin 41'
• Provenance:
  The Fred and Elinor Wrobel Collection, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  Faces in the Crowd: An Exhibition of Paintings from the Collection of Woolloomooloo Gallery, Sydney, Stanthorpe Art Gallery, Queensland, 2 - 28 November 1992, cat. 49, then touring; Tweed River Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 9 December 1992 - 3 January 1993
• Notes:
  'Now perhaps I'd better say something about my own work and my feeling about art personally, and the way I work. Well, I am primarily a classic artist, that is to say, what people call an intellectual artist, an architectonic worker; that is to say, I generally build pictures up step by step, like the architect building a building bricky by brick. That can be done sometimes very quickly, sometimes it takes quite a long time, and the idea may not come fully at once. I might make quite a number of quick sketches of the idea which will develop, and I always find that the design, the colour scheme and so on, for the purpose it is thought out, it changes right to the end. Of course I have always done an enormous amount of drawing from nature, landscape, interiors, exteriors everything I saw around me, also figure drawing, life drawing, paintings of life drawing using various media, that is to say charcoal, pencil, ink, colour, gouache and so on all my life, and these things have developed, of course, into a personal way of expressing and so on which is connected, of course, with my aim of building a sort of classical construction of my art as a whole. Many of the things are done, of course, straight from nature which might be more spontaneous and very free sometimes, but I find work generally tends to be controlled. Now, people say it is too intellectual and cold. I hold that it is possible to create beauty with the intellect, and that is what I've always tried to do, because I have strong views about freedom, entire freedom, with the romantic and the emotional. I think emotion can be a very dangerous thing, and if you just go wildly at the thing and allow yourself to be carried away and be spontaneous to a degree, it can be beyond control, and I think especially in the modern world it is an evil influence, though I must say that I enjoy a lot of the things that are done by romantics and the emotional painters, and I would not stop them doing it, I don't criticise them and I can appreciate them.' Weaver Hawkins in Geoffrey Dutton, Artists' Portraits, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1992, p. 68
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.